Indeed, what IS a ‘person’ ? It changes all the time, not only during a lifetime but during the course of innumerable lifetimes – so much is clear.
Now, a ‘person’, an ever-changing ‘person’ is in samsara from beginingless time, that is to say, there never was a time when the person was not. I use the word ‘person’to adhere to the title of the topic under discussion-it may be called an entity, an individuality, a being, a self, a Self, a lifestream – the ‘world’ has chosen the word ‘self’to denote it, but it does not matter.
Let us now substitute this word’ person’ with the word ‘I’. ‘I’ have been in samsara from beginingless time; that is, something in me or around me or in some way connected with me has withstood and survived all the changes during that time to find I-self here and now typing a post about I-self. This I-self is now striving to rid I-self forever of suffering by attaining release, Nibbana ,forever after. I-self stands now mid-way in Eternity with beginningless samasara in the past, the attainment of Nibbana being the mid-point, and endless time in Nibbana afterwards. Granted that there is constant change in a being, still how then is eternal existence denied to a being? Is not this I-self who has been so long in samsara the same I-self who is now striving to get out of it and who will in time be out of it forever if he succeeeds?
One thing we can admit straightaway: there is eternality as far as at least the past is concerned. The very idea of ‘eternality in the past’ should not be a cause for amazement at all, for we are used to it when we conceive of cardinal numbers as infinite. We start off with the number 1, so we do have a beginning but no end – this is ‘infinity in the future’ or ‘eternality in the future’ The terms infinity and eternity , that is begininglessness and endlessness in space and in time are to me one concept. If we now conceive of the series of numbers starting with -1, -2 etc, then too we have infinity, this time extending the imaginaty series of numbers infinitely backwards from 0. It is the same. This would then illustrate our time in samsara.
The reason why ‘there is no discernible beginning to life’, why
‘living beings have gone through innumerable birth-rebirth processes without a conceivable beginning’ is that if it were otherwise then existence would have had to arise out of non-existence, Being from non-Being. And non-existence itself does not exist. It is only a concept. Only existence exists. And because Beings cannot have come into existence at any point in time, then Time itself cannot have had a beginning. In fact this was the first ‘fact of existence’ that I remember contemplating when I was still a boy, that and the Infinity of Space, and what MUST follow from those two concepts taken as one – the criterion by which I judge the validity of a theory or concept. Anything inconsistent with it can only be partially or temporarily true.